When I say large enterprises are illusory, I don’t mean that they are not real. I am employing the first definition of the word: causing illusion, deceptive; misleading. But the illusory nature of large enterprises is less an attribute of the enterprise than it is of we who try to understand them. It seems to be in our nature to be undercorrect and overconfident.
Cognitive linguists like George Lakoff at UC Berkeley and Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon have advanced a very compelling argument that metaphor is not just how we speak, but how we think. For example, we understand argument in terms of a metaphor of combat: “your claims are indefensible“, “she advanced a theory”, “he shot down all of my points”, “I demolished his line of reasoning.”. And when we use a concept like war to think about a concept like argument, we necessarily ignore aspects of the concept that are not made available by the war metaphor. What if we thought of argument as a dance? We would likely plan and conduct debate differently. There are other examples: the future is up and ahead; love is a journey; knowledge is light or vision; ignorance is darkness or blindness; affection is warmth; government is parents.
Linguists refer to these metaphoric thinking tools as frames, and they argue that we unconsciously load frames into our working intelligence and use them to interpret and ultimately act in different situations.
I have an example from my own experience. One of the most powerful lessons I learned as an undergraduate was taught not by an academic professor, but by my dive instructor. He asked all of his students to throw their masks and fins to the bottom of the pool and had us line up at the edge. He then said “ready, set, go!” and we all dove in to find our gear. It was chaos. People were grabbing gear from each other, one girl got kicked in the face and came up crying, someone else got scratched and was bleeding. I was proudly one of the first to successfully retrieve all my gear. Then our coach tore us down: “What just happened here?” he yelled. “Are you animals? Tracy was hurt and nobody even noticed. Eric is cut. You were all fighting with each other. Why didn’t one of you go down, get a mask at random, and collect all the gear for the others?” I burned with shame, and I never forgot that lesson. But it had been a trap; he had deliberately framed it as a competition when he said “ready, set, go” and we had all used that frame to determine how we solved the problem.
The thing about frames is that they are incredibly hard to spot once they are loaded, and a great deal of evidence implying that they are wrong can stack up around you before you start to doubt. If my dive instructor hadn’t pointed it out, I never would have though twice about how that competition turned out.
False frames are incredibly dangerous. No one blunders as enthusiastically as someone who is wrong by assumption. False models for how the world works gave us witch burning, leaching, and lobotomies, to name a few. Looking back we marvel at the ignorance of these solutions to perceived problems, but close study shows that in the frame in use by the societies in which they were popular, these approaches were mainstream and entirely reasonable. They were establish, documented, and authoritative ways of solving for complex situations as they were understood at the time.
And this leads to one last attribute of frames: they are contagious. Politicians know this and use it. When the conservatives use the phrase “tax relief”, they are deliberately framing taxes as an affliction, and what kind of person could be against relief from an affliction? (george lakoff, moral politics);
Large enterprises are one of these complex situations, and like all such things we use metaphor to understand them. Business writers, business schools, and consultants build up authoritative, documented approaches to solving problems, which may or may not be right, but that are contagious and based upon assumptions that are difficult to see because they are baked right into the language. Given the difficulties in seeing and thinking about the enterprise these assumptions can survive unchallenged for a long time. One of them is what I will refer to as the “standard model” for understanding talent.